“….If you are an immigrant, Joe Biden is NOT your friend. Read my oped for the Sun Sentinel on his awful immigration record and why we need to do better….”

Good read

-snip-

Former Vice President Joe Biden was part of an Obama administration that put in place detention and deportation policies that planted the seeds for the anti-immigrant climate under President Trump. As a Democratic candidate for president, Biden needs to acknowledge and reckon with his place in the pain the Obama administration caused immigrants. I know firsthand the harm that came from the Obama administration’s immigration policies. In 2016, I was working as a community organizer with the Service Employees International Union in Miami-Dade County. Early in the morning of the August primary election, I got a call from my father as I was knocking on voters’ doors. With audible fear in his voice, he told me that he had just been in a minor traffic accident and that, although there was no damage to either vehicle, the other driver insisted on calling the police. My dad was undocumented at the time and did not have a driver’s license, meaning he feared he could be detained and deported.

I was too far to make it there in time before the police got to him, but thankfully my boss at the time was nearby. He rushed over there and was able to talk to the police and diffuse the situation. My dad was given several tickets and allowed to leave with a warning. This was the sort of fear that my family lived under for 18 years because of our immigration status in this country. That fear grew during the Obama administration, which embarked on the mass deportation of 3 million immigrants. I remember standing outside of Democratic Party offices during Obama’s first term with signs that read “Deporter-in-chief,” as we pleaded with the then-president to stop his harsh enforcement measures. Those deportations provoked fear and anger in our communities, and destroyed millions of lives. Biden has been repeatedly asked if he has any regrets about Obama-era deportation policies or if he would have done anything different. He has responded mostly by evading the question and saying that “President Obama did a heck of a job.”

That “heck of a job” that Biden refers to includes the implementation since March 2008 of a program called “Secure Communities,” which is basically a simplified model for state and local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. It allows participating jails to submit fingerprints of those arrested to immigration databases in an effort to identify individuals who are deportable. Former Department of Homeland Security Chief Jeh Johnson discontinued Secure Communities in 2014, but the damage had already been done. As a result of Secure Communities, ICE has deported more than 142,000 persons. The Trump administration restored the program in 2017. Other examples of the “heck of a job’ that the Obama administration did includes ballooning the budget for immigration enforcement to $18 billion annually, an amount larger than all other law enforcement combined and Operation Streamline, a program that prosecuted migrants in mass hearings without due process.

Biden will — and should — continue to be challenged on the harmful policies that were implemented when he was vice president and those he supported during his long Senate career. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which at the time was one of Biden’s proudest achievements, fueled mass incarceration and led to the separation of black and brown families due to harsh sentences. It included about $20 billion to beef up the tracking and incarceration of undocumented immigrants. Biden also voted in favor of the Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility act, a Clinton era bill that established punitive measures for undocumented immigrants, has been supportive of e-verify as a method of going after employers who hire “illegals” (his words not mine), and fought against driver’s licenses for the undocumented. He also voted for the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which promised to build 700 miles of fencing at the southern border for the purposes of ending unauthorized crossings.

Obama screwed this country and immigrants with a charming smile on his face. That’s a special kind of evil to be able to do that. Look at me, I’m clever and have a nice smile – turn around so I can stab you in the back.

That’s why he was able to do all the horrendous shit he did. He was the perfect NeoLiberal president.

“Operation Streamline” WTF? “Secure Communities” WTF?

Obama is responsible for what Trump is doing to immigrants. Obama opened that door and now psycho Trump has to one-up him.

The list of damage caused by that man (Obama) is almost endless and there are people in this country who still believe he was a good president. Biden being one of them!

Biden is like Trump. If you support and vote for him, 1. You’re uninformed and 2. You deserve what you get if he wins the nomination because you have been told what Obama/Biden did and you have SEEN it.

There’s more than enough proof that shows Obama/Biden were NOT good for anyone but the wealthiest in this country and if you don’t see that, you just don’t want to see it.

There’s people voting for Biden for no other reason than he was Obama’s VP. THAT is a big, big problem when people like that exist because it’s those people who are fucked over the most by people like Biden and Obama and Trump. Someone needs to wake them up. If Bernie can’t do that, they’re supporting Biden for another reason.